Tales from the Office on Employee Recognition, Employee Rewards, Life Hacks, Gamification, and Human Resources.

“Employees are a company’s greatest asset – they’re your competitive advantage. You want to attract and retain the best; provide them with encouragement, stimulus, and make them feel that they are an integral part of the company’s mission.” – Anne M. Mulcahy

How do you pick the best types of employee rewards for your company? There are numerous methods of praising staff. Each and every company’s situation is unique, and what might work for one doesn’t necessarily have to work for another. To try and help you determine the best way to motivate your workforce, we have sought to compile some employee rewards for you to consider. Here are seven of them.

1) Ideas for Employee Monetary Gift or Products

Who doesn’t want a shiny new Macbook?

Although we have quoted Dan Pink in the past as for saying monetary rewards can reduce productivity, staff nonetheless love cash and monetary prizes when appropriate. There are many options here to motivate your workers with monetary rewards. Don’t just stop at the employee when thinking about rewards. Consider their family as well.

Cash

Apple products, like MacBooks or the watch

HD flat screen TVs

Home spa package (lotions, bath bombs, oils)

Cooking appliances

Drones or other novelty high tech

Sporting equipment

Bicycles for adults and children

Car wash

In-home or in-office hair cut

Books

Pay for day care

The trick is to be creative. Ask your staff what they would want to have. Get your office community involved.

2) Gift Cards Selection for Your Employee Rewards

Cards are an efficient way to reward staff. Some benefits of gift cards include they are sent automatically through Recognize for free with the initial subscription, with the large variety of gift cards, there is something for everyone, and gift cards are digital, so they are always accessible. Popular cards according to a 2016 study include:

Target

Gamestop

Chipotle

Amazon

Walmart

Apple

Bestbuy

Fandango

Cabelas

Netflix

Home Depot

Nike

Victoria’s Secret

Sephora

AMC

REI

Whole Foods

Visa prepared cards (who doesn’t love cash?)

3) Monetary Experience Ideas for Your Staff

From boat cruises, tickets to a game, or gym pass, create a unique list of experiences for your staff.

4) Non-Monetary Experiences

This is where a company have to get creative about what they can leverage as employee rewards. Non-monetary experiences and non-monetary gifts are less utilized and redeemed, except for the day off. Everyone loves a day off! You may want to subsidize these rewards to have some of them redeemed more often.

Lunch with the boss (or CEO)

Boss for the day

Change offices for a day

Paid time off (15min, 30min, 1hr, half day, full day)

Conferences

Pizza Party

5) Company Swag Gifts

As you can imagine, these are less redeemed than other categories, since these are things that companies already give away for free.

Company sweatshirts

Company hats

Company mugs

6) Power for Staff

Companies rarely realize this is a reward you can offer and it costs no money. For those in the workplace that pull ahead, show promise, and deliver results promptly, assigning more power through delegation can offer them motivation to continue on the same trajectory they are on. Among the most common methods of assigning more power to better performing individuals is through assigning them some supervisory duties such as making them team leader.

Power to make a decision in an area they have show expertise

Power to come up with new ideas to tackle problems

7) Donating to Charity

Helping out is a part of the human condition. Involving your workforce in charitable events works towards building cohesion within your workers. When they relax and connect at a personal level while contributing to a worthy cause, the effects will spill over to the office as rapport and in turn productivity and retention improves. Out of the box, Recognize provides gift cards for a number of charities:

Charity Gift Cards:

The Nature Conservancy

Girls Who Code

RED

American Cancer Society

Clean Water Fund

National Park Foundation

Special Olympics

World of Children Award

Summer Search

Long Live The Kings

Non-Gift Card Charities:

Mix it Up

We recommend a mix of the above methods to motivate staff most effectively. Involving your workforce in determining the appraisal package is also a way of making the process more efficient. After all, they know what resonates with them. If leadership can offer perks and rewards staff love, your workforce will be more committed.

“Being a nurse means to hold all your own tears and start drawing smiles on people’s faces” – Dana Basem.

With healthcare being one of the fastest growing industries, organizations face challenges in more ways than before in employee engagement. That’s why more than ever, healthcare organization must consider employee recognition as part of their overall strategy. While healthcare employees work in extremely high-stress situations, and are not rewarded accordingly, the employers deal with serious challenges due to a high turnover rate and labor shortage.

Healthcare’s High Turnover and Low Satisfaction

According to a 2016 Nursing Solutions report, the average turnover in the nursing industry has reached 16.5% with an average turnover cost of $50k. SHRO’s are realizing this and that’s why behavior optimization and people analytics are on the rise in healthcare.

The report shows the current situation in the healthcare industry is driven by the inherently stressful responsibilities of the employees, the high turnover rate is also caused by a reason that can be actually controlled – employee recognition and satisfaction. Underappreciated and overworked employees will never be able to perform to their best. In fact, the lack of appreciation from the management is one of the top drivers of low job satisfaction, and consequently the main reason behind the high turnover rate.

The Healthcare Solution

Employee engagement strategies move the needle for employee satisfaction and retention. Healthcare managers need to make use of these programs and to combine them with the proper tools, education and empowerment methods in order to ensure that their employees are engaged with their work. A successful program decreases turnover, improve efficiency and promotes the core values of hospitals.

How to Make Recognition Programs Work

The execution is paramount for new initiatives to take hold. Recognition programs in the healthcare industry should be balanced between value-based initiatives and performance-based. Studies shows people want to feel appreciated for their work, and they want to be rewarded for their creativity and their unique contribution to the organization.

However, for the recognition program to work as designed, all personnel involved from managers and supervisors to doctors and nurses, need to be properly trained. That’s why at Recognize we built it to be so straightforward that staff are guided through the program intuitively. We believe all tools should be easy to use.

Regardless of technology ease-of-use, the linchpin for an engagement strategy is buy-in from all levels of the organization. The following are a few suggestions:

Give staff a reason to send recognition with non-monetary or monetary rewards

Make it easy for managers to run reports, receive notifications, and recognize staff in their workflow

Help leaders see the benefits of discovering qualitative people analytics through continuous positive feedback

Start Small Think Big

Recognition to your employees must be constant, unbiased, and meaningful. In the healthcare industry, it is important to be open to new, innovative rewarding ideas. While you can always use the existing goals and procedures for rewarding employees, innovation is what will make you benefit of a serious, appreciated recognition program.

Use Case: Making Workplace Safety a Priority

Healthcare workers are exposed to a wide variety of safety hazards. Several issues arose in 2015 that shed new light on patient safety threats. As part of a complete employee recognition program, you need to recognize and reward those employees that have been affected by an accident. At the same time, you can make workplace safety a priority by integrating this aspect into your reward & recognition program. Gallup’s employee engagement database shows 70% fewer safety incidents compared to companies with disengaged staff.

The Result: Giving Rewards

Receiving awesome perks at work as a result from employee recognition will lead to long term success of an employee engagement program. Gamification shows we can use a variety of resources. SAPS stands for Status, Access, Power, and Stuff. These are the four elements you can provide as rewards to staff.

Status – Create a special video about someone in the company and present it company-wide. Give people a special job title based on their qualities.

Access – Give staff access to conferences or even a parking spot.

Power – The power to make a decision based on the qualities they have shown.

Stuff – Gift cards, days off, massages, lunch delivered, or cash are all popular examples.

The least expensive most effective gift to an employee is status.

More Staff Reward Ideas for Healthcare

Lower back massages each Wednesday

Employee awards banquet once every six months

Monthly meeting with the boss: each month, employees are invited by their superior to attend a lunch meeting

Free tickets to sporting events for overtime hours

Wall of fame recognition

20% bonus for Holidays

Pizza party event

Various other bonuses for performance and for positive customer feedback

How to Do Employee Recognition for Healthcare

As a rule of thumb, you need to base your program on four unique elements:

Unified platform:

Due to decentralization, a unified platform available in the cloud is vital for your recognition program’s success. The platform should be accessible from any device and should integrate seamlessly with third-party apps. Showcasing employee recognition and creating a team environment increases productivity by 12.5%.

Recognition options:

While it is vital to make sure your employees understand the importance of being recognized and rewarded, you should also ensure that they are be allowed to recognize their peers. Your employees should have multiple recognition options in order to become part of the larger organizational culture.

Mix of informal and formal strategies

While formal, branded awards are imperative for building up the organizational culture, informal awards are necessary to add a human touch and make the experience complete.

Customizable awards

The last element of a successful rewarding program in the healthcare industry is a flexible program. You need to be open to change and base your rewards on the changing trends.

Once you put together all of these elements, you have a solid base for your employee recognition program. To get it rolling, here is what you need to do:

Whether the team takes a trip to Hawaii or event based themes, recognizing your employees helps boost morale, productivity and engagement.

Create a project team

For starters, it is important to establish ownership of the program. The team within the institution should be cross-functional, incorporating multiple units in the hospital, the HR and IT departments. Or just someone well liked in the organization that people know and respect.

Allocate a budget:

Next convince the members of the board, the directors, and the stakeholders that putting money in an employee rewarding program is an investment that pays off by itself. HR professionals with budget of at least 1% of payroll are more likely to perceive positive effects on the organization than less than 1%. Healthcare is ranked third highest in turnover rates with 13%, improving this is accomplishable with tried and true employee engagement methods.

The cost of employee turnover not only means financial repercussions, it can result in lowering the knowledge base in your company and decrease performance and workplace morale. – Streamline Verify

Promote the launch and help your employees understand the recognition and rewards process.

Promote the launch:

Create a big event and promote it across all departments. Everyone should attend and it should be fun for everyone. Who doesn’t love a great party that celebrates everyone’s accomplishments?

People Want to Make a Difference in Their Workplace

They want to know that their work matters, especially in the healthcare industry. However, you need to go the extra mile and create a rewarding & recognition program if you want to have happy employees. Put together a recognition platform and you will be able to reap the benefits that result from keeping your employees satisfied.

Leaders of organizations must shape their company’s culture. Incentivizing behaviors is one of the best ways to handle culture change. You cannot afford to jeopardize the overall morale of the employees and affect the overall productivity, because of fractured values of your company culture.

You can help your employees overcome unaligned behavior by incentivizing behavior changes with practical steps without affecting productivity.

Focusing on Inward Employee Improvement

Vineet Nayar is the former CEO of HCL Technologies and an author of a book considered a revolution in management, “Employees First, Customers Second“. His company has succeeded the challenge of tripling its turnover ($4.2 billions today). He agrees focus on inward improvement will lead to strong company culture and high employee retention.

Incentivizing behavior changes in the employees is the new frontier for optimizing enterprises. Instead of pressuring employees to do their work, smart companies come up with creative ways of reenforcing positive behaviors.

For instance, a company that struggles with employees who report to work late may decide to focus on what it means to go above and beyond. In this case, the management may introduce rewards for those who get to work early. This is a simple way of incentivizing behaviors towards the exceptional. At the end of the day, the company will have a more aligned culture, one directed away from coming in late.

Employee Recognition for the Win

Incentivizing behavior changes has proved to be effective and quite rewarding. Besides getting your employees to be in sync, the productivity levels and the morale increase significantly. While bonuses are good, there are other practical ways to recognize and incentivize behavior change in employees. For instance, if an employee is named in customer feedback as exceptional, reward them with a special experience, a job title change, or a monetary gift such as a Kindle Unlimited subscription (If you haven’t tried it, the Kindle is awesome).

Peer-to-peer Employee Recognition

The coveted form of employee recognition is peer-to-peer, or when staff recognize each other for great work. A quality peer-to-peer program is one that is based on the goals and values of your company. In Recognize, staff send badges based on company values. Staff can receive points for those badges that can be redeemed. If an organization is seeking to improve customer experience, they can reward high-value employees in customer service with a field trip to Disney, where they have a program to learn more about customer care.

Act like One of the Top 100 Places to Work

How about setting up a kid’s center where employees can bring their children? This will create a work/life balance for the staff. You could get on-site medical practitioners to keep checking on the overall well-being of your employees. By providing these perks, staff feel like they are in a special club and can take their mind off other life issues.

Introduce relaxing services like manicure, laundry, yoga, massage sessions and any other thing that will reduce stress levels. You can provide passionate employees access to a mentor.

Workplaces are seeing generation tides, Millennials are a big part of the workforce now and with each new generation adapting to changes are necessary. Just how well is your company adapting to fit the Millennial generation into your workplace? Let’s look at the current statistics to help you evaluate your company’s current methods, how to adapt with Millennials and inspire them:

What these statistics show is insufficient workplace culture and current way of obtaining talented Millennials. It’s vital to understand who they are and what they want, they make up 38% of the U.S. workforce. Simply, desires and expectation are not being met today.

67% of Millennials will be engaged at work if they strongly agree the mission or purpose of their company makes them feel their job is important.

While Millennials are known as job-hopping generation. How do you inspire or keep your talented Millennial employee? There are few ways to hire, inspire, and keep your Millennial.

Step 1 The hiring process:

Every recruiter or hiring manager will ask this interview question, “Where do you see yourself in the next 3-5 years?”. Asking a Millennial this question is probably the hardest question they are going to answer. Millennial will jump ship if their employer lacks opportunities for them. Millennials are born as opportunity seekers, every hiring manager must set opportunities and help each millennial understand that opportunity.

Set expectations and lay out the opportunities before hiring a Millennial, and make sure to deliver those opportunities.

Provide staff with bi-annual milestones to reach long term goals. Remind them of where they are currently and help them develop to reach those opportunities. Millenials and Generation Z expect fast returns on investment. In the real world, that doesn’t happen often. Remind them of the steps they are taking to reach the mountain.

By setting those milestones, your staff will understand the tasks at hand and fulfill their goals. You can also celebrate each milestone achieved by using a recognition program to help them see and feel instant gratification and a sense of achievement.

Step 2 Feedback is important, but how:

19% of Millennial say they receive routine feedback. Millennials want feedback but won’t ask for it. We need to discuss the importance of transparency and opportunities. Millennials won’t ask for feedback simply because they have high expectations and are overachievers. They are constantly sprinting for results and the current way for a company providing feedback is too long of a process, it’s not helpful and a waste of time. Your company can perform one on one feedback or with the whole group to help encourage each other to grow and be transparent with one another.

Unhappiness can still arise. When setting each milestone, you must ask for their evaluation, try to understand from their perspective and show them empathy. Communication with a Millennial is vital; otherwise, how do they know if they are doing a good job, or understand your perspective and or see themselves moving forward? While feedback is important, emphasize where they are currently and how you can help them get to the next level. Providing short and instant feedback is crucial is today’s landscape.

If your company is currently using the S.B.I (Situation, Behavior, Impact) model to provide your employee’s feedback, you are on the right track. This element of engagement and performance might be one of the greatest missed opportunities for leaders and managers. If your company does not have several opportunities for your employees, you can implement a Recognition and Rewards program with a company like Recognize.

Creating a nomination badge

Recognition programs are a way to reach out to Millennials. It provides instant recognition and gratification. They can comb through their level of achievements instead of printed awards and certification. Instead of communicating your feedback via words, why not create badges? Encourage feedback, think Twitter, likes, short and relevant actions for your Millennials. Personalize recognition campaigns by asking your Millennial employees to come up with badges and awards, which can provide a sense of ownership and help boost productivity. Be transparent and ask them for their opinions and ideas. Recognition can be display at your office with kiosk mode, where your employees can see their achievement. Encourage each other to participate, create friendly competition, and compliment your Millennials hard work.

Step 3: Workplace Culture

Millennials are entrepreneurial. Maximizing these “intrepreneurs” who have a strong desire for achievement and who sets high standards and expectation for themselves and those around them. They will also look up to leadership for inspiration and motivation. Millennials want a manager whose ethical, fair, values transparency, and dependability. They want a boss who cares about their development and exercises their strength daily at work. It’s not just about 40+ hour work week and a consistent paycheck. It’s about how they can contribute and grow within the company.

How are you developing your employee’s skills? Are they learning or is it a mandatory checklist? Truly engage with your Millennials, you must provide a better education and learning system that will challenge them. It’s about being relevant and being practical. How can they use what they’ve learned now and in the future?

To evaluate your company’s culture, here are four questions you should consider. This goes for all generation and from the book The Human Capital Edge, by Ira Kay wrote,

Is this a winning organization I can be proud of?

Can I maximize my performance on the job?

Are people treated well economically and inter personally?

Is the work itself fulfilling and enjoyable?

Helping Millennials understand these questions can help them visually see where they will be within those 2-5 years. What is your company’s goal for your Millennial employees? What recognition and rewards are you providing your current employees and how well is it being received? Create a winning culture environment that your employees can be proud of, and your company will acquire and retain talented Millennials. Your office will become a workplace where they feel inspired and motivated to stay and grow.